But he stood to it valiantly; a wise,
faithful, unconquerable man;--swallowing down how many sore sufferings
daily into silence; fighting like an unseen Hero,--nobody publishing
newspaper paragraphs about his nobleness; voting pieces of plate to him!
However, he was not lost; nothing is lost. Robert is there the outcome of
him,--and indeed of many generations of such as him.
This Burns appeared under every disadvantage: uninstructed, poor, born
only to hard manual toil; and writing, when it came to that, in a rustic
special dialect, known only to a small province of the country he lived in.
Had he written, even what he did write, in the general language of England,
I doubt not he had already become universally recognized as being, or
capable to be, one of our greatest men. That he should have tempted so
many to penetrate through the rough husk of that dialect of his, is proof
that there lay something far from common within it. He has gained a
certain recognition, and is continuing to do so over all quarters of our
wide Saxon world: wheresoever a Saxon dialect is spoken, it begins to be
understood, by personal inspection of this and the other, that one of the
most considerable Saxon men of the Eighteenth Century was an Ayrshire
Peasant named Robert Burns.
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